helden sterben nicht
by midwestern-duchess
Summary: "Hell is empty and all the devils are here." -William Shakespeare (She stands in the operating room, flanked on all sides by death, her table occupied by a thing teetering between man and corpse.)


She moves about the infirmary, half-Mercy, half-Angela.

Her Valkyrie suit is damaged—more than likely beyond superficial repairs. It hangs off her body, looking less like the angelic armor it's intended to be and more like some kind of robotic cocoon slowly encasing her.

The right shoulder has been blasted off, tearing through her black undershirt and leaving a nasty wound that's steadily bleeding as she bustles around the table. She took a shot to the chest, and her breastplate sports a handful of cracks radiating out from the point of impact. A delicate spider's web threatening to crumble at any moment. Her left gauntlet is missing, and all the remains is more torn fabric that exposes torn skin and a forefinger that is rapidly swelling and turning an nasty shade of purple. One of her wings was torn off at some point during the battle, leaving behind an ugly, marred mess of wires that still crackle every so often, spitting leftover sparks from her back. Her halo has—she notes with a sardonic twist of her lips—been cracked and knocked askew.

The irony does not escape her.

The angel with the crooked halo. The doctor with crooked morals.

The thing on her table hacks out a hideous cough that she's mildly surprised doesn't result in him spitting up an entire lung.

"Gabriel," she murmurs, ignoring the way her stomach rolls as she calls the thing by her dear friend's name. "Gabriel, stay with me. Please. You can't stop now."

He stares at her with eyes she knows are unseeing. They're glassy and unfocused, much like the rest of him.

She's hooked him up to an IV, and fastened and oxygen mask to his face, cursing her lack of resources as she hustles across the cracked linoleum floor. She'd been planning to restock in the coming week, due to a lull in action. Then _someone_ had decided to kick-start an Overwatch civil war and it all became meaningless.

She glances over at the someone in question, worrying her lip as she watches his chest rise and fall sluggishly, listening as his wheezing fills the room.

"It's going to be okay, Gabriel," she murmurs. She's always talked to her patients—even when she was a student doing her practicals. Whether the patient was willing, or able, she always chatted quietly to them as she worked. Her professor had tried to get her to kick the habit, insisting her prattle creates a stronger bond, which he discouraged in the emergency room and trauma ward.

She'd politely agreed, but quietly kept up the practice. She'd never believed in distancing herself from her patients.

She's just about to perform a final check over the syringe she's prepped when there's an almighty crash from behind her, and the door to the infirmary his kicked clear off it's hinges and slams into the ground with a force that shakes the whole room.

She whirls around, clutching the syringe in a white-knuckle grip as she faces the intruder. She can't stop a gasp at what she sees.

"Step away from him," Jack Morrison murmurs, his broad frame filling the doorway, the barrel of his rifle aimed at her patient.

Her patient who is located behind her, meaning, by simple laws of trajectory, the rifle is aimed at _her_.

"John," she gasps. "John, _please."_

He looks like death. His hair is matted with blood, and more is trickling down his face. Her eyes run the length of a gash that stretches diagonally across his face. An enormous purple and black bruise is blossoming across the right side of his face, and angry red lacerations trail all the way down from his throat. His shirt has been sliced to damn near shreds, his body armor busted and cracked. She hears the rattling in his chest when he breathes, and knows what she can see isn't even half of it.

She can only stare, eyes wide, mouth agape.

"If you bring him back, you'll be the first person he kills," Morrison warns, his voice heavy with a kind of tiredness that has nothing to do with a need for sleep and everything to do with a need for peace. "Angela, _please._ Stand aside."

"He's my patient," she whispers, shifting her weight and widening her stance as she stares up at him. Her actions kick some trigger of her busted suit back into place, and the single wing that remains stretches out to block Reyes from view.

Morrison gazes down at her, expression drawn.

"I will help you too, John," she whispers. "Just give me a moment, please. You're in no better shape than he is."

Something in his eyes flashes. She's misspoken.

"Don't you get it?" he demands roughly. "Overwatch is done. It's _dead._ Let him die, and I'll let myself die, and we'll do the world a favor."

She shakes her head, eyes stinging with tears.

"You don't believe that," she whispers. "You can't really think—"

"He attacked me, Angela!" Morrison shouts, and in another lifetime, she might have flinched. But now, as a woman who is lulled to sleep by gunfire, she simply stares at him. "He attacked _Overwatch._ What will you gain by bringing him back? What will anyone gain? The world is sick of us!"

She glares, brandishing the syringe as she spreads her hands. "So that's a reason to kill a man who was once a champion for humanity? Gabriel was a good man!"

He scoffs—an ugly, hoarse sound that's halfway a choke. "We're all good men. Then we die." He steps closer and she tenses. "Move, Angela."

Her hand slips behind her back, fingers curling around the grip of her Caduceus Blaster.

"Don't, John." There's a whisper of a warning in her words. "You are a good man, and you are not yet dead." She swallows hard. "You are a soldier. You have seen worse than this."

His gaze drops to her wandering hand, and his jaw tightens with annoyance as he looks back up to meet her gaze.

"There aren't any good men here, Doctor," he tells her, a solemnity to his words that reminds her of a eulogy. "Just ghosts."

Her expression hardens. "And yet here you stand before me," she argues. "Alive."

He coughs out a dry, lifeless chuckle. "You don't need to be dead and buried to be a ghost, Doctor." His fingers flex on the grip of his weapon. "Now move."

She doesn't. Silence hangs. His weapon hand stays absolutely steady, even as blood continues to trickle down his face.

"Don't make me kill you, Angela."

It isn't a threat. It isn't a warning. The line is not delivered with venom or malice or hate. It is broken and begging.

 _Please,_ his tone pleads. _Please do not make me hurt you._

And in another time, perhaps she would have. Perhaps she would have accepted his plea and left the room—Valkyrie suit hanging from her slender frame like a tattered flag of surrender, her doctor's pride missing in action, all her hopes and dreams for the future slowly drawing their last breaths in time with the man on the table.

When Gabriel Reyes dies, Overwatch dies. And when Overwatch dies…

She stares him down.

"If you want him," she whispers, words so sharp they tear her mouth to pieces as she spits them out, her sidearm glinting in the harsh lights of the infirmary as she draws on him, "try and take him."

It is a battle she has won before it even begun. There is too much of Jack Morrison—the good, kind, lion-hearted farm boy from Indiana. Too much of the man who still believed in Overwatch—in his own ability to do good.

Soldier 76 has not yet crawled out of the dark, doubt-riddled parts of Morrison's mind. That cold, vindictive, callous man who would have shot her where she stood for standing between him and his target. The shell of humanity's greatest hero. A ghost of the great, golden statue.

But this is not Soldier 76. This is Jack Morrison.

And Jack Morrison would never lay a hand on her, or anyone else unless he had absolutely no other choice.

So he stretches out a hand—burned so badly she actually hisses in sympathy as her eyes trace the damage—and drops it heavily onto the muzzle of her blaster, lowering it until it points at the ground.

"You will regret this for the rest of your life," he says, and she realizes this his last attempt at persuasion—her last chance to put both Reyes and Overwatch to death with dignity.

"You're wrong," she vows, but the tremor in her voice betrays her.

He stares her down, and she forces herself to meet the horribly marred gaze of the greatest soldier in the world. Blood seeps from the wound on his face—a horizontal slash that cleaves his rugged, handsome face.

"There's this quote from this old movie," he murmurs, his voice that low, warm, steady voice she recalls from so many mission briefings. The voice that would always pull her away from long, sleepless nights in the infirmary. A calloused hand tugging her gently away with a murmured, " _they'll be there tomorrow, Doctor. It's okay."_

"Yes?" she prompts him softly, her voice sounding weak even to her own ears.

He his eyes snap back into focus, and the sudden contrast between his brilliant blue eyes and the crimson that stains his face is jarring.

"It's a hell of a thing, killing a man," he recites quietly. "You take away everything he's got, and everything he's ever gonna have." His eyes trace the still body behind her. A thing not quite corpse, not quite man, but some undead half-breed. "I've killed a lot of men, Doctor. And it looks a lot like this."

Her gaze sharpens, indignation swirling up at his implication.

"I am a doctor," she nearly growls, a kind of fearsome, feral bite to her words. "This is an _infirmary._ You think I'm going to kill—?"

"Gabe is dead." The statement is blunt and cold. Morrison gestures to her patient. "That thing? Whatever you're desperately pumping life into?" He shakes his head. "It's nothing. I know you're doing this for Overwatch, Doctor, but it's just as dead as he is."

She allows herself to turn then, glancing over her shoulder as she stares into the ashen, lifeless face of Gabriel Reyes. If she knew what the future held, she might have taken a moment to appreciate his face. In time, she'll forget what lies beneath the mask of Reaper.

"Let him go, Angela, _please."_ He lifts his weapon again and she spins around, eyes flipping wide as she hastily raises her own gun with a hand she desperately hopes isn't shaking.

"Stay away from him." Her warning is riddled with uncertainty.

"It isn't _him,"_ Morrison insists. "Gabe knew what he was doing when he cornered me in that room. He full intended to blow me and the whole building to hell—himself with it." His gun flashes as he adjusts his aim. A straight shot.

"I'd do it for you too, you know," she whispers back. "If it were you on this table, and Gabriel holding a gun on me. I'd do the exact same thing."

He stares her down. "I wouldn't want you to."

Her eyes flash. "That's not something you get to decide!"

"And you do?" he questions lowly. He lets his gaze play over her battered Valkyrie suit. "This whole time, we called you Overwatch's angel, when you'd rather have played at being god."

His comment trips something in the back of her mind—it rattles and shakes for attention under the suffocating blanket of uncertainty that blankets her thoughts.

"Good men may die," she whispers. "But heroes never will."

She moves quickly then—more quickly than a battle-beaten Morrison can follow to stab the syringe into Reyes' IV. She then spins, lashing out with her Caduceus Blaster to whip him across the face.

Maybe she aimed her shot just right. Maybe Morrison is just tired of fighting.

Either way, the result is a collapsed body on the floor of the infirmary, and she hastens to catch his head as he drops, setting it down gently.

With a sigh, and a strange sort of emptiness in her heart, she kneels beside the unconscious soldier, using the last of her first-aid equipment to begin cleaning up the worst of his wounds.

On the table, Reaper draws his first breath.

On the ground, Jack Morrison breathes his last.

Between then, a woman sits, half-Angela, half-Mercy.

Somewhere between and angel and a god, with a bit of devil masquerading as both.

* * *

I like this. A lot. Which is weird because I haven't been happy with my Overwatch stuff, but I think I finally found my groove.

This is sort of a companion to my other Overwatch fic, Forswear. In that piece, Mercy is telling Reaper about the time she and Soldier 76 fought, which he has no memory of, because he was busy trying to not die. This is that scene.

Anyway, that movie quote Morrison uses is from the 1992 film _Unforgiven._ I've never seen it, but I remember reading that quote somewhere and it's always stuck with me.

As always, I do my research, and all the biographical facts are canon. Yes, Soldier 76 is a fucking farm boy from Indiana. Miracles do happen.

I really like the dynamic between these three _(she says when one of the characters is unconscious the whole goddamn time)_ and am toying around with a fic detailing Overwatch's falling out and how it specifically affects Mercy, Reaper, and Soldier 76. Or would you guys rather see other Overwatch characters? Or am I ruining Overwatch and should I take my mediocre writing elsewhere? Tell me! Please!

If you don't wanna leave a comment here, feel free to pester me over at my tumblr ( dominodebt) You can send me requests if that's your thing. I'd really like to hear from you guys, because if you guys really aren't digging my Overwatch stuff, I'll leave it be.

Have a good week, team!


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